18,588 research outputs found
Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
Wireless Power Transfer and Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks
In a rechargeable wireless sensor network, the data packets are generated by
sensor nodes at a specific data rate, and transmitted to a base station.
Moreover, the base station transfers power to the nodes by using Wireless Power
Transfer (WPT) to extend their battery life. However, inadequately scheduling
WPT and data collection causes some of the nodes to drain their battery and
have their data buffer overflow, while the other nodes waste their harvested
energy, which is more than they need to transmit their packets. In this paper,
we investigate a novel optimal scheduling strategy, called EHMDP, aiming to
minimize data packet loss from a network of sensor nodes in terms of the nodes'
energy consumption and data queue state information. The scheduling problem is
first formulated by a centralized MDP model, assuming that the complete states
of each node are well known by the base station. This presents the upper bound
of the data that can be collected in a rechargeable wireless sensor network.
Next, we relax the assumption of the availability of full state information so
that the data transmission and WPT can be semi-decentralized. The simulation
results show that, in terms of network throughput and packet loss rate, the
proposed algorithm significantly improves the network performance.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular
Technolog
Adaptive Body Area Networks Using Kinematics and Biosignals
The increasing penetration of wearable and implantable devices necessitates
energy-efficient and robust ways of connecting them to each other and to the
cloud. However, the wireless channel around the human body poses unique
challenges such as a high and variable path-loss caused by frequent changes in
the relative node positions as well as the surrounding environment. An adaptive
wireless body area network (WBAN) scheme is presented that reconfigures the
network by learning from body kinematics and biosignals. It has very low
overhead since these signals are already captured by the WBAN sensor nodes to
support their basic functionality. Periodic channel fluctuations in activities
like walking can be exploited by reusing accelerometer data and scheduling
packet transmissions at optimal times. Network states can be predicted based on
changes in observed biosignals to reconfigure the network parameters in real
time. A realistic body channel emulator that evaluates the path-loss for
everyday human activities was developed to assess the efficacy of the proposed
techniques. Simulation results show up to 41% improvement in packet delivery
ratio (PDR) and up to 27% reduction in power consumption by intelligent
scheduling at lower transmission power levels. Moreover, experimental results
on a custom test-bed demonstrate an average PDR increase of 20% and 18% when
using our adaptive EMG- and heart-rate-based transmission power control
methods, respectively. The channel emulator and simulation code is made
publicly available at https://github.com/a-moin/wban-pathloss.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health
Informatic
Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks
MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes
equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to
communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data
packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of
applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and
may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless
networks.
This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues
related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network
protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to
ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh
networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in
wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of
this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples,
however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not
restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability.
First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating
a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using
WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance
gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes
a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and
wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical
0. Abstract 3
function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation
further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process,
to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management,
while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation
among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal
operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to
the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question
of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data
ferries is investigated
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